New Year's Eve

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When Betty Boop sold herself to some 1%-ass mogul in the mid-1930s, possibly Hearst, her life was made for her, henceforth-wise. It looks like she lives in a scale model of Xanadu, in a neighborhood where every mansion even has its own rooster!



This Fleischer Brothers short subject portrays the morning after Betty's birthday party. But I am exercising blogger's license to state that her birthday happens to be 31 December, because first, I'm going for a holiday theme; and second, it's as likely as her having been born on any other day of the year except 29 February. (However, on momentary reflection, I'm thinking she might actually have been conceived on New Year's Eve. That's not a problem, though, since cartoon characters have a virtually instantaneous gestation period.)

Had this cartoon portrayed her 1933 party, it is likely that she would not have awakened alone---there would have been at least one animal in bed with her, and very possibly a spooky clown, too. But this event occurred after 1 July 1934, so our heroine slept alone. Hollywood's golden age of censorship depressed her enough that she put on some weight below the neck and lost some above. Plus most of her spunk (heh heh). Back in 1933, pre-Code, Betty went mano a mano fearlessly with gorillas, skeletons, hungry cannibals, and ogres; but in 1937, she is daunted by the mess her degenerate guests made of her crib. "I'm tired of cleaning things/But I'm tied to my apron strings," she complains. The plutocrat pig Hearst did this to you, baby---run for the hills, Betty! Burn the place to the ground! Call Bimbo and tell him to meet you back at St. James Infirmary!

Too late. Grampy's here. Well, at least he drives a bitchen roadster with four spare tires (just in case!), no doubt one of his original designs. Whatever flows through Grampy's veins, it seems much more effective than a 10% solution of the type Sherlock Holmes employed. Judging by Grampy's reaction to mainlining it at about 4:30, I'd guess a cocktail of mescaline, absinthe, and espresso... on Sunday morning, a few minutes after sunrise!

I think Dave Fleischer might have been trying to sneak something past the Code office at the very end, where Betty sucks down Grampy's thick, foamy head. How about you?

Happy New Year, "gangstas"!

House Cleaning Blues, Betty Boop and Grampy (1937, A Betty Boop Cartoon; Dave Fleischer, Director; Eli Brucker and David Tendlar, Animators; Fleischer Studios), via YouTube, embedded for noncommercial critical discussion and educational purposes.

Merry Christmas to my ectoplasm!

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Jak sie masz, Babies! This year I got you two a nice robot to share! And it's not one of those phony Transformer shits, neither---this one's actually real! You can tell just by listening! Plus, he's "as strong as a moving van"! What could be stronger than that?



It is not widely known that "The Mechanical Man" is the first known recorded example of techno-rap. Also, careful listeners will note a sly postmodern reference to a 1964 Peter and Gordon hit near the end. (Not really.)

The Mechanical Man, Bent Bolt And The Nuts (1966, MGM Records K-13635-A), via YouTube, embedded for noncommercial critical commentary and educational purposes.

Big Otis!

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Santa Crutch has decided it's time to jak sie masz Big Otis so he stops picking through everyone else's Christmas stocking. Sing along!



I think you should work this into the rotation when make your traditional Christmas caroling rounds tonight. I'd suggest premiering it at the Persia VFW post, after guzzling perhaps about half a dozen bottles of Slits beer.

Do be sure to have a Blessed Season on this, the Eve of The Most Beautiful Holiday ever conceived by the mind of Homo sapiens. And if you must drink and drive during this holiday season, drink Slits!

Mr. Businessman, Ray Stevens (1968, from "Even Stevens," Monument 18102), via YouTube, embedded for noncommercial critical commentary and educational purposes.

Speculations on the origins of Marginalia

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Jak sie masz, sir. Let us travel back through the mists of history to examine what I am certain to be a credible account of the Marginalia origin myth.



"They came in tins." Hotcha! I think this explains why that chain mail was all rusted up inside. I am happy that you were able to win the heart of "the missus" (if not then, then eventually) and that your decades of toil enabled you to retire to "the allotment" to produce a bumper crop of "bangers and mash" or whatever it is that grows on your foggy isle. Best wishes to you both.

In my imagination, Swinging London was probably a still a glorious place even at the sunset of Peter and Gordon's recording career. I did in fact enjoy those lads a lot, including---inexplicably---this particular selection. This tune hit in Chicago during the winter of 1967 and helped to keep me company as I walked a predawn paper route with a Montgomery Ward transistor radio about the size of a cinder block in my canvas bag. (It belonged to my sister and played 45 rpm records, too!) It also reminds me of sniffing model airplane glue for some reason. I am certain that you were up to even more glamorous things in those days, in pursuit of your Fair Maid.

The Knight In Rusty Armour, Peter and Gordon (1966, 45 rpm single Capitol 5808), via YouTube, embedded for noncommercial critical commentary and educational purposes.

...now, you didn't really think I as going to leave you with that thing, did you?



Only three Georgie Fame singles charted in Chicago in the mid-1960s, and this is both the most obscure and my favorite. I've looked for it on YouTube in the past with no success, but now there are several versions posted. I remember being fascinated by the jazzy arrangements of "Yeh Yeh" and (especially) "Get Away." I thought his voice and delivery were about the coolest thing I'd ever heard. Even today, this sound strikes me as unique, and I couldn't really make a very good guess about who influenced his style. I hope this selection isn't overplayed on the oldies programmes in Merrie Olde England, and that it is as much of a flash for you as it was for me to rediscover it.

Get Away, Georgie Fame and The Blue Flames (1966 or 1967, live performance at the Town Hall, Offenbach, West Germany [other performance notes not available]), via YouTube, embedded for noncommercial critical commentary and educational purposes.

Oil Can Harry, assume the position

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You are jak sie masz-ed!



Even though I know you are a sock puppet you still deserve a doke during this, the blessed holiday season. I guess these guys may share some of your sock puppet DNA. Unfortunately, there don't seem to be any Jim Henson Kraml Milk commercials posted to YouTube, so I guess you'll just have to be content with this. Or not.

Wilkins coffee commercial, produced by Jim Henson (1950s, provenance unknown), via YouTube, embedded for noncommercial critical commentary and educational purposes.

Little Oscar!

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Jak sie masz!



It sounds not unlike "boinging music," some might say. Wikipedia tells me that this insane little bundle of gnat notes began life pretty much as a small throwaway interlude at the end of "Act III, Tableau 1" (whatever the hell that's supposed to mean). The video was recommended earlier this season by Nick Scratch in a comments thread.

Flight Of The Bumblebee, performed on button accordion by Alexander Dmitriev (composed c. 1900 by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov), via YouTube, embedded for noncommercial critical commentary and educational purposes.

Oh, wait. Doesn't Little Oscar like her present? Well then put this one in your pipe and smoke it!



And take that Doug-Stevenson-looking SOB playing guitar with you! At least he may look that way if you squint hard enough. Booze can help. (Well, of course, booze can help anything... except for maybe the heartbreak of cirrhosis.) He sure gets a lot of tones out of that axe around his neck---horns, percussion... in fact, everything except guitar.

Don't you wish you were the senorita with the pearl necklace back there? She's like The Anti-GoGo Girl, lurking in that low-rent MC Escher-type expedient stage landscape, waiting to strike like an asp! A low-energy asp.

Let's Lock The Door, Jay and the Americans (c. 1965, performance information and video provenance unknown), via YouTube, embedded for noncommercial critical commentary and educational purposes.

Hope in an open sewer

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I don't know much about Vaclav Havel except that he was a playwright who became the president of two different nations (Czechoslovakia and the Czech Republic) after the Soviet collapse, and that he appointed Frank Zappa as a U.S. trade and cultural advisor---first formally and then, after pressure from Secretary of State Jim Baker, informally.

Havel was an avant garde author and dissident who was hounded, beaten, and imprisoned for expressing unapproved political ideas. He's someone I'll read more about, someday, but the other day Esquire posted a short essay by Havel contributed to the print mag in October 1993. It was to commemorate Havel's death over the weekend. This passage from the piece struck me:

I've always been deeply affected by the theater of the absurd because, I believe, it shows the world as it is, in a state of crisis. It shows man having lost his fundamental metaphysical certainty, his relationship to the spiritual, the sensation of meaning — in other words, having lost the ground under his feet. As I've said in my book Disturbing the Peace, this is a man for whom everything is coming apart, whose world is collapsing, who senses he has irrevocably lost something but is unable to admit this to himself and therefore hides from it.

His observation seems precise and perfect to me, and as applicable in this time I share with you as it was 20 years ago. The whole essay is worth reading. Although he is too gracious to say it directly, one gets the idea that the communal effort to rescue Havel from drowning in a subgrade silo of sewage resembled a clown show for almost a half hour until someone came up with the brilliant, obvious way to rescue him. His point is that he would have lost his life if he and his fellow partygoers had given up hope... and not only did he live for another day, but 6 months later he became leader on the global stage.

Havel's concept of hope begs for comparison with Obama's "hope" as a political slogan, especially its relevance to the open sewer that authoritarianism and corporatism have made of our nation. To Havel, hope was concrete and imperative for survival, and therefore definitely not a corny or moonbat sentiment. I will have to put some Havel plays on my reading list.

What Child Is This? or whatever

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Gurlitzer, consider yourself jak sie masz-ed! Let's call this one a Christmas carol for the minister's daughter. I suppose it's at least as much a Christmas song as "The Anacreontic Song" is a national anthem.



I don't know much about music theory, but I'd bet that Jimmy Smith and other monsters of the Hammond organ probably play 10-part harmony from time to time, at least for punctuation or other purposes intended to excite the startle reaction in the listener. What do you think, Gurlitzer---have you ever read a part that calls for all ten digits to hit a different tone in the chromatic scale at the same time?

During the 1950s and 1960s, there was this practice in the jazz recording industry of putting a really "white," lame song on an otherwise straight-ahead album. A classic example is John Coltrane's 1961 rendition of "My Favorite Things" from the 1959 Rodgers and Hammerstein Broadway production "The Sound of Music." Although there's nothing necessarily wrong with any such given performance (although Sinatra's rendition of "Forget Domani" is certainly wretched), the choice of material always seems dicey to me. I'm guessing it was a way for the label to get the Little Lady of the house listening to bop (or whatever), just like they put "Stairway" on Led Zeppelin IV or "Layla" on Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs so the hippie chicks would listen to their "old man's" vinyl.

Any-hoo, "Greensleeves" seems to me like a weird choice for Jimmy Smith, maybe even weirder than a show tune would have. But he plays all the shit out of this traditional melody, along with trio-mate Kenny Burrell's guitar. I especially like the little two-chord vamp that begins the cut and recurs throughout. More generally, I'm a big fan of this Hammond/guitar/drum power trio format, and there's a lot of it on tape. (Buy it on CD or vinyl so "The Cloud" can't take it away from your computer without a warrant or habeas corpus, which seems to be on the horizon.)

So put that in your pipe and smoke it, lady!

Greensleeves, Jimmy Smith (1965, from "Organ Grinder Swing," Verve CD reissue 314 543 831-2 [2000]) via YouTube, embedded for noncommercial critical commentary and educational purposes.

Merry Christmas to PaintChick

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Jak sie masz! See if you can guess why this is your Christmas present from Santa Crutch, my knitwit friend.



Jay Ward's spoor is all over this spot, of course. If you watched cartoons in the 1960s then you probably recognize the voices, even if you can't put a name to them. Sharp-eared viewers will catch a military reference to the scrooch gun, which was the principal weapon used by Moonmen Gidney and Cloyd in the very first Rocky And His Friends adventure, "Jet Fuel Formula" (a 40-part epic poem, kind of).

Quisp cereal television commercial (1966, Jay Ward Studios, producer), via YouTube, embedded for noncommercial critical commentary and educational purposes.

For The FiftyNiner

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I'm sure you know many versions of this one, but I'm afraid I'm just not qualified to surprise you for Christmas, Dick Dale-wise.



To make matters worse, surprise-wise, this is certainly the most overexposed track from Mr. Dale's catalog thanks to Pulp Fiction. However, I'm thinking that maybe, if you're a little like me, you may at least appreciate the presence of the lady in the foreground sporting the classic mid-sixties wide track chassis. Also, dig that opening shot---very promising... before the director settled for a wimped-down blackout segue into a pretty static filming of the Del-Tones performance.

But what the heck does Dick Dale need with these Del-Tones, anyway? First, listen for them---are they even playing? I can hear one of the two rhythm guitar players, barely, and a bit of drumkit in places about halfway through. The tenor and bass may be there just to add sex appeal. No, probably not---take a look at these jokers when the film starts jump-cutting between mugshots, around 2:10. Holy kazoosis! And they can't even sway convincingly. No wonder there's only one gal in the audience! And she's probably there with Dale (at least for the evening).

It must have been the FiftyNiner who told me that Dale has some strong Arab roots. Listening to his technique on this cut and so many others, it seems like that should have been obvious, but I never made the connection. It occurs to me that Dale's use of a mode for the lead line, instead of a diatonic scale, gives him something in common with Miles Davis (assuming that my earbones understand it correctly, and they may not). Davis purportedly "reinvented jazz" using that composing technique a few years earlier for Kind of Blue.

So anyway, young feller, Merry Christmas... because you've been jak sie masz-ed!

Misirlou, Dick Dale and the Del-Tones (1963 performance from the Bengal International film, A Swingin' Affair), embedded for noncommercial critical discussion and educational purposes.

For the Persia Powerhouse

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Jak sie masz! This is for the smokin' redhead who keeps almost everything running on a rural settlement in far-western Iowa.



I recently observed her in action, bouncing between Persia, Omaha, and even Lincoln, Kansas, like a deranged skittle would, but somehow not showing any of the mania or signs of breakdown I'd expect of a woman her age (i.e., my age) trying to take care of everything at the same time. We visitors loved the part where she calmly requested her grizzled spouse to remain seated while she told him that there would be an unannounced dinner guest for Thanksgiving. His reply, something to the effect of "Jesus fucking Christ!", did not seem to faze Rusty at all, and she assured us that he would "be OK" a little later. Then she sent him on an errand that demanded him to pipe down. She's a top-drawer tactician in addition to being a dynamo.

This version of "Powerhouse" is new to me. We all know it from old Warner Brothers cartoons---the main melody and the bridge are used separately in the cartoons for different purposes. But I've never heard it played by harmonicas, or even imagined that such a thing could be done. But here are six swell-looking guys who make it so. If this weren't a gift to a Lady, I'd probably say something like "listen to those motherfuckers go!"

Powerhouse, The Six Philharmonicas (1940, performing the Raymond Scott composition in the Warner Brothers film short subject, "The Dipsy Doodler"), embedded for noncommercial critical discussion and educational purposes.

And I quote:

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Here's Charles Pierce at Esquire commenting on how this cycle's Republican presidential crop is in a class by itself compared with all other past GOP fields:

Okay, maybe Jon Huntsman is a hyper-conservative John Anderson, and Mitt Romney is a hyper-disingenuous Bob Dole, but Huntsman's polling in the Marianas Trench, and the entire party wishes Romney would die in a fire.

 Also, today's doke.

For the commenter with many names

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Jak sie masz! Dude, you are known by more names than The Prince of Darkness. And even if You are He, I'm confident that you will still enjoy what Santa Crutch is about to stuff up your sock.



I think this selection is the absolute cream of Spike Jones. For one thing, I think the arrangement is just simply better than the original by David Rose; the Rose version begins too abruptly, and the first section is too staccato for my taste. The harp intro on this one is an essential touch that I remember from my childhood as we tossed the original Jones 78s around the living room until breaking all but one---this one.

Even though the cowbell in the first bars of the main theme will startle you, the phrasing is more subtle and expressive than in the Rose production. And listen how Jones passes the melody around every coupla beats to a different---but perfectly logical---instrument.

The second section is played surprisingly straight, with melody on whatever kind of bells those are, alternating phrases with brass, and filled with string flourishes. And the third section relies only on comic vocalizations, not Weird-Al type lyrics as Jones so often does in his parodies. It created a riot in the living room every time we played it when the old folks were gone---it's probably why we only have one of those 78s left. This one was on the turntable while we were slinging the others around, driven loony by the laugh chorus.

So, Lucifer, Happy Festivus (or whatever you secular humanists celebrate these days). Or Happy Monday Night, if nothing else. And look on the flip side of the copy of "Drip Drip Drip (Sloppy Lagoon)" you recently acquired; that's actually the B side on my version of Holiday For Strings."

Holiday For Strings, Maestro Spike Jones and His City Slickers (not dated, RCA Victor 20-1733-A, from the 78 rpm album "Musical Depreciation"), embedded for noncommercial critical discussion and educational purposes.

Christmas doom and redemption

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This Christmas season brings memories of the paterfamilias, to whom we shall refer on this blog as Selig, who used to torment his children into compliant behavior during the Christmas season with a dread three-word phrase that spelled Christmas doom: "jak sie masz". It is pronounced yock-sih-mosh, with minor accent on the first syllable and major accent on the last. In our household, the term was both an interjection---a command---and a transitive verb. The latter usage would be something along the lines of "Get back into bed right now or I'm gonna jak sie masz you!"

A jak sie masz-ing would commence when Selig set down his bottle of Drewery's on the kitchen counter, snatch the receiver from the chrome cradle of the flesh-colored* wall phone, and twirl out a sequence of numbers on the rotary dial. He was calling The North Pole, of course, and I remember listening with dread as that dial chik-chik-chik-chikked it's way back to rest, awaiting the next pluck of Selig's index finger to advance the fateful call.

The intent of this exercise was to modify the behavior of an irritating child before Santa picked up the line. When successful, the old man would hang up the phone without having to rat out the kid. But if any of us called Selig's bluff long enough for Santa to pick up, then Christmas perdition was imminent. You see, jak sie masz is "Eskimo" for something like "Don't leave [Big Otis or Little Oscar or Gooch or Piggly Wiggly or The Gobber] any presents this year!"

I remember this technique being highly effective for behavior modification purposes between Thanksgiving and Christmas Eve. Almost always, the offending child would back down long before Selig's call to the Jolly Old Elf was completed. Nevertheless, there were  instances when some of us actually did get jak sie masz-ed (certainly BO did). However, I further remember that Selig would later phone Santa to annul said jak sie masz. I do not know why the old man would relent after he cast the die, given that he was monster enough to unleash this weapon in the first place. But Santa complied with his directives.

Well, now it so happens I am happy to announce that apropos of nothing I have been inspired to revive Selig's innovative holiday personnel-management tactic here at Fifty50. Long story short, I have jak sie masz-ed the whole bunch of you! But don't worry---it works differently here at my place in the 21st century. Being a progressive citizen, I have prebuilt amnesty into my call to The North Pole: I know you've all been rotten this year, but you can't help it because you're not normal. For that reason I've instructed Santa Crutch to deliver each of you a nice, bloggy Christmas present sometime this month. So look out.
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* A more accurate description would probably be "caucasoid-colored."

Not exactly a purported image of Jesus in a piece of French toast

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But it's even better! See the outwardly mediocre photo below and try to find the super-awesome subliminal image embedded within it.

Shot at the Cowboy Monkey, Champaign, Ill., Friday evening whilst Big Rock Head was blowing some section work with the Parkland College In-Your-Ear Big Band.

And I will hasten to add that, no, the ugly motherfucker at center left is not your genial host. How could you even think such a thing?!?

Click to enlarge. Taken with an iPhone 4s in available light using its digital zoom capability. The camera in the thing is quite impressive. I'll share some of the landscapes I made over Thanksgiving in western Iowa, on the estate of one of this blog's correspondents.